Howard Hochhauser: 0:02

It's amazing. I remember growing up looking at her thinking oh, this is this you know, not fragile, but sort of smallish. You know, family woman from Eastern Europe. You know, I certainly didn't think of her as a tough guy.

Crista Cowan: 0:17

Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as the Barefoot Genealogist. I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history, and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything. When I first started working at Ancestry, one of my very first jobs was content acquisition over Europe. Basically, what that meant was I was responsible for finding contractors and individuals we could work with in those countries around Europe that would help us identify what historical records existed and then work with me to negotiate with the archives and libraries in order to acquire records that we could digitize for them and publish online. One of the sets of records that I was often made aware of was found in an archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany, and it was called the International Tracing Service, or ITS. It's an arm of the Red Cross. Now here's what these records are.

Crista Cowan: 1:32

After the end of World War II, all of the Allied forces divided Germany into different zones and as they went through after the war helping with the refugee effort, helping with the cleanup efforts they would collect the records that the Nazis had created of their own persecution. Like. They kept meticulous records, meticulous records about concentration camps, records about the experiments that they performed on people, records about the transfers that they made of individuals, records of the people that they murdered, and those records were then collected by the Allied forces and they were all delivered to a facility in this tiny town in Germany by the different Allied forces. Over the course of the next 40 to 50 years the Red Cross maintained control of those records in that facility and the reason is because they developed what was called the International Tracing Service, the ITS. The ITS was responsible for helping individuals who had been displaced to find permanent homes, so they helped with the refugee camps, they helped get people resettled in Canada and the US and Australia, in different places in South America, and they used these records to help do that. Another thing that that service provided was the opportunity for individuals to fill out a form seeking information about what had happened to their family members, and so you could fill out this application with what you knew and you could submit it to the ITS. And they had researchers on staff who would go through this vast collection of the records of Nazi persecution and they would see if they could determine if the family member had survived or died and if they had survived, then the subsequent records the Red Cross had kept about refugee camps and placement. They would reconnect you with your surviving family members and it was a valuable service and it took years, decades of the Red Cross working to help reconnect. Some of these families have no connection with family members who in some cases also still survive in other parts of the world because they didn't know the ITS existed or because they hadn't been able to make that connection. And there's some really great work going on in the world with individuals who are using ancestry DNA, for example, to help reunite some of these individuals who, many of them, are in the last years of their life and there's only a few survivors left, and so there's some incredible work happening. But the other bulk of work that is happening is connecting family members with the stories of what happened, both to the victims and to the survivors.

Crista Cowan: 4:44

So several years ago I had the opportunity having now been moved on to a different role at Ancestry of working with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to help digitize some of their records. It was one of the most meaningful moments in my career at Ancestry to be able to work with them to gain access to nearly 70 million records that they held in their possession. But always in the back of my mind was this set of records in this little town in Germany that had been collected and then built upon by the Red Cross. That had been collected and then built upon by the Red Cross by the time the Red Cross turned that collection over to Bad Arolson to create the Arolson Archives and the International Center on Nazi Persecution. I had moved on to other roles at Ancestry, but the team, the acquisition team, continued to work with the US Holocaust Museum and now with the ITS records that the Holocaust Museum was going to get a copy of. And so a few years ago, Ancestry through the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem in Israel and some other Holocaust museums around the world, all were able to obtain copies, digital copies, of the ITS records from the Arolson archives and those records now being more broadly available. Being digital and searchable online meant more discoveries were available more quickly for more people, both survivors and the descendants and family members of survivors.

Crista Cowan: 6:36

As those records were getting ready to be published the indexes and the images online at Ancestry, I wanted to dive into them and to see if I could find a story, if I could come to understand the records a little bit better, because this was the first time I'd actually seen them in person. The CFO at Ancestry at the time, and still today, is Howard Hochhauser. Howard has Jewish ancestry and I had been a little bit familiar with his family tree, but what I didn't know was that he had a grandmother who had survived the Holocaust, and I also didn't know that there wasn't a whole lot that he knew about her. But when that came out, I decided, along with one of my colleagues, to see if we couldn't dive into these Arolsen Archives records to find out if there was any information about her that we could learn to help Howard understand her and her story a little better, her and her story a little better. So I hope you will enjoy this episode of Stories that Live in Us as I talk to Howard Hochhauser about the discoveries we made about his grandmother.

Crista Cowan: 7:54

Howard. Thank you so much for being here. I am so glad you have joined me today. I'm really excited to talk about this story with you because it's something that I got to be a little bit involved with along the way. But I'd like to go back way before we made this discovery and just have you tell me about your grandma no-transcript is the grandmother that I grew up with.

Crista Cowan: 8:43

Yeah, so did your dad. How old was your dad when Serena came into the family?

Howard Hochhauser: 8:48

Oh gosh 40s.

Crista Cowan: 8:51

Okay. So did he have concerns or did he get along with her right away, like having a new mom all of a sudden at the age of 40-something, right?

Howard Hochhauser: 8:59

Yeah, you know, typical sort of stepmother interaction. I suppose I also have a stepmother now, but no, she was welcomed into the family. But it's really interesting, she's from both my grandmothers actually were Eastern European and so they had this, you know, sort of toughness about them and I sort of vividly remember that about both of my grandparents.

Howard Hochhauser: 9:28

Yeah, and so, as you were, raised with Serena as your only grandmother. What kind of a grandmother was she as she interacted with her grandchildren? Remember when I was a kid and you know you'd have an upset stomach and she'd be from eastern Europe, she would say, howard, you know, have a small glass of beer. So you're a young kid, have a small glass. Or just the food you know we should have borscht. You know this is beet juice, basically, uh, we'd have chopped herring on Sundays and and to this day I still do that, which I sort of got from that my kids look at me funny when I'm having cold fish with sour cream. But no, she was a loving, warm person.

Crista Cowan: 10:02

Yeah, and how long ago did she pass?

Howard Hochhauser: 10:06

So many years ago back in the you know before 2000.

Crista Cowan: 10:09

Okay, so at some point you decided you wanted to learn more about her. What was?

Howard Hochhauser: 10:16

the impetus for that.

Howard Hochhauser: 10:17

Really you know, working at Ancestry right. I joined Ancestry because I found my old man's draft card from my grandfather and, as it turned out, he had been living down the block from me in Lower Manhattan. I had no idea and the first time I saw he was living on Pitt Street. I saw his signature. I'm like, oh my gosh, this, you know, these old records are pretty powerful and that's what actually, you know, catalyzed me to move to Utah and join Ancestry, so doing my family tree. I knew she was in the Holocaust Growing up. My parents had told me she got war reparation. I had a check from the German government for being in the Holocaust. But don't ask her about it. And gosh, just being around all these records and Ancestry sort of gave me the bug to find out more.

Crista Cowan: 10:57

Yeah.

Crista Cowan: 10:58

So there was a time a few years ago where the ITS records came available and, just for the benefit of those listening, the International Tracing Service in Germany is in a place called Bad Erlsen, and at the end of World War II, as the Allied forces moved in to Germany and the German occupied territories, they scooped up the records and they delivered them to the Red Cross.

Crista Cowan: 11:23

And then the Red Cross used those records to help those who had survived the Holocaust find out what had happened to their families. So they were using those records to determine were these people killed in the Holocaust records to determine were these people killed in the Holocaust, were these people in refugee camps, were they displaced, were they relocated? And so, starting at the end of World War II, in the 1940s, for decades the Red Cross ran this service to be able to help survivors locate family and find out what happened to them. And a few years ago those records became more widely available to the world. They've been transferred from the Rod Cross to a private company. That private company, then, is working with genealogy companies like Ancestry to get those records digitized, indexed, made more searchable and available online. And as Ancestry got involved in that, you saw an opening.

Howard Hochhauser: 12:19

Yeah, and so that was really. I have the record here. You know, that was eye-opening for me. That had the date she was put into a ghetto. That had the date she was moved to Auschwitz. It had the you know, the date she was put into forced labor and then freedom the you know the day she was put into forced labor and then freedom. Yeah, right.

Crista Cowan: 12:44

So this whole experience that she had gone through on a card, essentially, and that card represented records that had more details behind it. So we went digging, yeah, and we found some of those records. In the things that we discovered, was there anything that was most surprising to you?

Howard Hochhauser: 13:00

gosh. Well, even before we got to this record, I found her, uh, her request to become her naturalization record, request to become a citizen in the us, and it was this beautiful color image, uh, it. It said she was a widow. I had no idea she she was ever married. It had her former husband's name. I found out that she had actually didn't know what happened to him. I Googled his name and he was part of a master, he was a doctor, along with 200 other people were just they were forced to dig their own graves and murdered. So I found that she I discovered had been looking for him, had no idea. I don't know, to the day she died if she ever knew what happened to him. Yeah, so I found that in the US on our service. And then, yeah, this ITS document. I had no idea any of this. You know forced labor, the date that she was put in, she was actually went to Auschwitz relatively late, which raised some like how?

Crista Cowan: 14:00

is that? Because who survives Auschwitz?

Howard Hochhauser: 14:02

Yeah.

Crista Cowan: 14:02

Right, like that's the story we hear.

Howard Hochhauser: 14:05

And, as it turned out, the way she survived Auschwitz, which was this forced labor. Yeah, from that document we found another document, which the name is just disturbing. It's this this says the ss hygiene institute. Right, it sounds like a noble thing.

Howard Hochhauser: 14:23

And then what I found out is what that meant is she was actually in a, uh, you know, forced human experiments for, for I think, three weeks, while she was at auschwitz. Uh, and I found, or we found, uh, actually a, a handwritten document who knows if it was written by a SS soldier or a prisoner but literally a handwritten document from Auschwitz listing her name as having been subject to these experiments.

Crista Cowan: 14:51

Yeah, and then typically the path that people took from there was to the gas chambers, but she was pulled out of that and sent to this forced labor. I remember finding this and I think I would like to read this. I think more than 1.5 million Jews were exterminated in Auschwitz. Fewer than 50,000 were spared that fate and, as one writer put it, some of them were literally pulled out of the ranks of the prisoners who were being stuffed into the crematoria, informed by an SS officer that they should be happy, since they were about to leave Auschwitz and that their destination would be factories in Germany. Like she's in this experiment, she's in this death camp and somehow she's spared in the middle of all of that, but she's put into forced labor then and under who knows what conditions.

Crista Cowan: 15:39

So to learn this about her. She then survives the war because of this forced labor camp, and we have records from the ITS that she went looking for her mother, that she went looking for her husband, that she actually stayed in Europe for a few years before she immigrated to the United States and again, like you think, they would flee as quickly as possible, but she made a choice that's really interesting, in light of her circumstances, to me. I don't know what you think about that.

Howard Hochhauser: 16:10

Yeah, no gosh, it takes hardship to a whole new level. As you said surviving. You know this, this experiments, human experiments, surviving forced labor, surviving Auschwitz, uh, staying in uh Eastern Europe. Uh, when I told my my dad didn't know the story, no one in my family knew the story. Uh, he was just so grounding and then just eyeopening to all of them.

Crista Cowan: 16:35

Yeah, wow, so she comes to the US. You found that naturalization record. There was a passenger list. She makes her way almost immediately, if I remember correctly, out to California. Which was that a period of her life that you knew about? Zero, no idea.

Howard Hochhauser: 16:50

And now I found that out. You can find this picture of this little pink house in LA.

Crista Cowan: 16:54

I love that. What did she do while?

Howard Hochhauser: 17:01

never had known anything about her past.

Crista Cowan: 17:03

Yeah, wow. And then she makes her way eventually back to New York, where she meets your grandfather.

Howard Hochhauser: 17:08

Exactly.

Crista Cowan: 17:09

I love that.

Howard Hochhauser: 17:09

Back to the East Coast.

Crista Cowan: 17:11

Okay, so this woman that, like you, viewed somebody as a grandparent and I think sometimes that's the only role they play in your life is as a grandparent. But now you have this whole complete view of this life that she lived and these horrific things that she not just went through, that she survived. How does that change your perspective of her and maybe even of some things from your own childhood?

Howard Hochhauser: 17:36

Yeah, it's amazing. I remember growing up looking at her thinking oh, this is this, you know, not fragile but sort of smallish. You know thin woman from Eastern Europe. You know I certainly didn't think of her as a tough guy but in reality gosh to survive that she's the strongest person I've ever known.

Crista Cowan: 17:59

Right yeah, after you discovered all of this. You mentioned that you had conversations with your father, and I suppose those probably are ongoing.

Howard Hochhauser: 18:10

But you have two children. How old were they at the time? So I told them the story when we did it together three to five years ago, so they were teenagers. They were definitely old enough to understand what I was talking about and could comprehend it. And they study World War II and we have been to Israel as a family and so they could appreciate Judaism and sort of what World War II was and what it did to people.

Crista Cowan: 18:36

How do you think knowing that about her maybe changed their perspective about their own identity or even your own family narrative?

Howard Hochhauser: 18:45

It has come up. When they talk about, oh my gosh, this is hard or this is challenging or this is difficult, they know in the back of their mind no grandma did that's difficult.

Crista Cowan: 18:56

Yeah, yeah. How has it changed you having that knowledge?

Howard Hochhauser: 19:03

The same and sort of. I think we're all now just a little stronger. Uh, you, my son was bullied at school and someone made this Holocaust jokes and it's interesting, he uh came home and it it sort of made him stronger. He's like we're going to fight this and so he didn't back down. You know he said he wanted to fight the school. You know who at the time didn't take much of an interest and these kids were making some pretty horrible Holocaust jokes and they were young and they probably didn't know what it meant. But I think his reaction of standing his ground, pushing back educating these people on what the Holocaust was, was a result of understanding what his great grandmother had gone through.

Crista Cowan: 19:51

Yeah, wow. So your dad, you've spent a lot of time with him, especially recently. Yeah, has his perspective changed at all?

Howard Hochhauser: 20:03

Yeah, he knew none of this. He even didn't know that his mother was from ukraine, so he learned as part of this. I researched his mother also. You know the war in ukraine now he's connected to that wants to help out the people there. He didn't know serena, you know he had this image of his stepmother. He didn't realize his stepmother was actually a Holocaust. You know what she had gone through. Absolutely, absolutely. It changes the perspective.

Crista Cowan: 20:31

Yeah, so now you have this family narrative or this piece of a family narrative. Your family narrative is so much larger, but this just adds a piece to that. What do you hope for the future for your family?

Howard Hochhauser: 20:44

Well, you know, one thing we're doing is it's right now I'm applying for a Polish citizenship for me and my kids In a way, because my other, my mom's mom, was from Poland, you know to honor that generation so all my grandparents are from Eastern Europe and sort of to connect my kids to that generation, to what they went through, to what they lived through, to how they survived, and so it's, you know, a very real, tangible thing today, and I hope to give them this gift, you know, to honor the people that passed away and to preserve their memory.

Crista Cowan: 21:20

Yeah, those generations are so much more connected through us, I think, than a lot of people ever realize, and that's one of the things that family history does for me. It sounds like it's something it's done for you and your family as well.

Howard Hochhauser: 21:33

Yeah, there's a melody we sing in temple, the Dovah Dov, and it means from generation to generation. That is literally the name of the song is from generation to generation. So that's the goal is to pass these stories down.

Crista Cowan: 21:45

Beautiful. That was a perfect ending too. Thank you, love it.

Howard Hochhauser: 21:50

So good. That's a story every time I talk about it, yeah it's hard to do that, but I think it's important.

Crista Cowan: 21:56

It's important that people hear those stories. It's important. I mean not just. You know I do a lot of work in the Jewish community.

Howard Hochhauser: 22:03

And.

Crista Cowan: 22:03

I think they talk about some of those things a lot more now than even they did 10 or 20 years ago, especially now that that generation is dying out. That didn't want to talk about it.

Howard Hochhauser: 22:12

Yeah, I grew up everybody had a thick accent and it was just there was Holocaust survivors everywhere and people that you know just knew people in the Holocaust. Yeah, now it's a generation removed.

Crista Cowan: 22:23

Yeah, and so now there's more conversations happening about it. Yeah, that was a generation removed. Yeah, and so now there's more conversations happening about it, but I think those conversations still aren't happening enough outside of that community. Like, I think there's a lot of people who still. You know you read the diary of Anne Frank or you take a class in school and that's pretty much the exposure to that. You know you watch a Steven Spielberg movie, but beyond that there's no real human connection, and so thank you for being here.

Howard Hochhauser: 22:46

Thank you, but beyond that there's no real human connection.

Crista Cowan: 22:49

And so thank you for being here and thank you for honoring her memory. Yeah, absolutely Appreciate you.